Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 906 pages
- Published by: Cambridge University Press November 17, 2003
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0521820812
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0521820813
-
Book Dimensions:
9.8 x 6.9 x 1.9 inches
- Weighs: 4.4 pounds
Product Review
' a fascinating book, aimed at those physicists and mathematicians who have an interest in cosmology.' Mathematics Today ' will find its prominent place on my shelf.' General Relativity and Gravitation
Product Review
"Highly recommended." Choice
"Experts will be able to go as deep as they like, but even those with only a 'popular science' interest in recent developments in particle physics,
astrophysics, and cosmology will find much to interest them." SIAM News
"As readable as a very hard book on theoretical physics would be." New Scientist
Reader ReviewsThis book collects a series of lectures given at a conference celebrating Stephan Hawking's sixtieth birthday. If you don't know who Stephen Hawking is then this book is definitely not for you! His contributions are too extensive to give a comprehensive list here, a very short list of highlights would include seminal contributions to singularity theorems, quantum cosmology, co-authoring one of the great books in general relativity and his discovery that black holes emit (approximately?) thermal radiation. The lectures collected in this book provide a more complete overview of the many areas in which he has contributed. Given Hawking's accomplishments it's not surprising that the books contributors include many of the world's most prominent physicists. There are forty-four chapters covering a vast range of topics in theoretical physics. The level of the material also has a wide range, from introductory to very advanced discussions. I thought the selection of papers was great. The first part of the book is at a very introductory level. That isn't to say the material isn't quite interesting. The topics include basic general relativity, gravity waves, cosmology and singularities. This part should be accessible to a general audience. The remainder of the book is more advanced, some of it quite advanced. Nevertheless I would expect much of it to be accessible to advanced undergraduates. Some of the material is fairly standard such as cosmology (standard general relativity treatment), inflation and black holes (standard general relativity version). However, most of the topics presented involve less well understood physics. It's difficult to describe the breadth of the content without just looking a table of contents, but I'll try to give a rough idea of it. Not surprisingly there are many talks on physics of black holes that isn't completely understood. A partial list of black hole topics includes: primordial black holes, inner-horizon stability (a tentative answer is given), string effects and information loss. Here is a very coarse grained list of the rest of the content: loop quantum gravity, chronology protection conjecture, topology change, the holographic principle (or conjecture, depending on who you ask), Euclidean quantum gravity, topology change, string theory (touched on in many talks), quantum cosmology (basic, with supersymmetry and implication for the problem of time), cosmology (a wide variety) and more. In summary, many interesting ideas in theoretical physics are discussed. They naturally center on general relativity, quantum gravity and cosmology. Even the difficult topics are fairly accessible. I would expect most graduate students would enjoy it, as would many advanced undergraduates with a solid background in general relativity and quantum mechanics (however, a lot of the material is quite challenging). Some of the material would also be interesting to astronomy and astrophysics students too.
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